by Gill Pringle

With his seminal horror masterpieces Ringu (The Ring) and Dark Water, Japanese director Hideo Nakata introduced the world to the now-familiar term, “J-Horror”.

Ringu was later remade by Gore Verbinski as The Ring in 2002 starring Aussie Naomi Watts and Kiwi Martin Henderson, while Nakata was brought in to direct the 2005 sequel, The Ring Two, again with Watts and co-starring fellow Aussie Simon Baker.

Prior to his Ringu fame, Nakata first terrified Japanese audiences with Don’t Look Up. Today he returns to those early roots with Ghost Theater, delving into the back-stage horrors of a playhouse haunted by a possessed mannequin, reaffirming his place as the leading creator of J-Horror.

We chatted with Nakata, 54, during the 28th Tokyo International Film Festival where Ghost Theater was shown in the special J-Horror category. Meeting at Tokyo’s S Hotel in Roppongi, we removed our shoes and got down to horror basics.

What originally drew you to filmmaking?

“As a child I loved cinema but when I went to the University of Tokyo I planned on studying journalism or engineering. By then I was watching about 300 films a year which led me to work as an assistant director at a Tokyo studio which inspired me to become a filmmaker myself. So it was my cinephilia that drew me to rise up the ladders of Japanese filmmaking.”

And why did you choose to specialise in horror movies?

“My journey of horror filmmaking was an accident, or possibly you might say fate, because when I was an assistant director I was asked to direct a TV drama and the first episode I directed just happened to be horror. My first feature film, Don’t Look Up, also was horror. At the time I thought the horror genre might more easily be made than any other genre. So rather than my being passionate about the horror genre, it was more by accident that I was drawn into it. I cannot say that it would have been my personal choice.”

Ghost Theater deals with possession. Do you believe that objects can be possessed?

“There is a Japanese traditional small doll called an Ichimatsu doll, oftentimes a woman dressed in a kimono. They are popular in our culture and it is believed that these dolls have souls and they often even cry, and you see tears coming out of their eyes, or their hair grows over the years. You may call it a superstition but there is a belief that when you want to part with them, you can’t throw them away easily, and you must give them to a shrine or burn them to pay respects to them. I can’t say that I believe in that myself but I have respect for those who believe in that. If I had a doll for 50 years, for example, I can‘t say that I could easily throw it away even if I don‘t personally believe the doll has a soul.

In western horror movies it’s common to see satanic small children’s dolls or evil ventriloquist’s puppets. However, in Ghost Theater, the doll is human-sized like a store mannequin. Can you explain this choice?

“I thought a lot about the size of the doll. If the main character was the size of a doll, like a child, and the doll was the size to be held in her arms, then that could be scary. In Hollywood, you have the film Child’s Play, for example. But in Ghost Theater, it is a stage play and the actors are not children, they are grown women so I think if they had a small, child-size doll it wouldn’t work and, instead, it would be slightly comical. I actually cast a slightly taller actress for the role of the doll so she’s a little bit higher than the other actresses so she would be looking down on the other actresses and that, I think, was very scary in itself.”

Are you superstitious having made so many horror movies? Has anything strange ever happened on set?

“17 years ago when we were shooting Ringu 2 [1999 Japanese sequel], we were on location at the sea and we had a microphone which actually captured the sounds of the ghosts coming up from the sea. It turned out to be a great promotional tool and it was reported a lot on Japanese TV, where we heard a male voice saying the name of the woman who was killed and the year she was killed. Some tourists were watching us film on location and they heard it and thought it was the male actor saying the name of the woman but the boom operator said it was impossible because the microphone was directly on the water and it could only capture the sound coming directly out of the water. There has to be a scientific explanation for that but it was very strange and cannot be explained to this day.”

You have worked both in Japan and Hollywood and continue to have representation in both countries. How do you reflect today on your experience in Los Angeles?

“It’s true that my experience in Hollywood toughened me as a filmmaker and a businessman, if you can call filmmaking a business. You could say that I am more comfortable working in Japan where I prefer, as a director, to be more artistic and consider my films to be more a creative and artistic product rather than a commercial product. In Japan, the director has a stronger creative control over the product and that is different in Hollywood where we give away our power.”

Why do audiences enjoy being scared so much?

“This has no scientific backing but I imagine that this has to do with human nature – human intuition, something like sexual desire, or something in the animal brain or the centre of the human brain that is a receptor to fear or uncertainty, similar to our desire to continue reproducing our genes. So there is something in all of us, I think, that desires fear and uncertainty. For example, we can go back to the caveman where the caveman is always aware and ready for the animal to come and attack him and that somehow stimulates the brain. So I think that our intuition is very similar to the primitive man in that we desire this stimulation of this fear and uncertainty, and it helps propel us in a way.  My other thought is, perhaps less out of intuition, but when the first caveman saw that a family member dies and the corpse is lying there in a cave and he has to watch the body decompose and change its form and he must wonder, ‘Where did that person go? Where did that soul go?’ So there’s a certain sense of imagination that arises in his mind and that’s probably why we are so drawn to the unknown, therefore the genre of horror has stayed with us throughout the generations.”

You are so successful as a horror director. Do you feel trapped by the horror genre, perhaps secretly wishing to direct comedy or romance?

“When I first went to Hollywood, I was determined not to make horror movies. I thought I would make suspense and thriller movies but never horror, so it’s very ironic that in the end my first Hollywood film would be a sequel of a remake of my own film which was definitely horror. I do feel like it’s a small genre and I am tired of being typecast but I feel like I’m not ready to say goodbye to the horror genre and I have to deal with it for the rest of my life. At the same time, I am also working in documentaries and I’ve done some drama and love stories. But, as a horror filmmaker, my market value is higher than in other genres, therefore I am unable to leave the horror market and go into other genres. Simon Baker told me he had seen one of my non-horror films like Sleeping Bride [Garasu no no, 2000] and told me he really enjoyed it. I was very happy to hear that.”

What was the most challenging aspect of filming Ghost Theater?

“I had to set up the fact that the doll is drinking up young women’s blood, and the doll is becoming a monster. So I had to ask the actress to play the role of this monster-turned-doll in a way that the doll has to be un-human-like but at the same time is played by a real woman and so that transition of human to both doll and monster was very tricky.”

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